1. Technical Field
This application relates to geographical location indexing. In particular, this application relates to customizable geographical location indexing.
2. Related Art
The availability of powerful tools for developing and distributing Internet content has led to an increase in information, products, and services offered through the Internet, as well as a dramatic growth in the number and types of consumers using the Internet. To sift through this immense volume of information, a user often submits queries to search engines that provide responsive information that meets the criteria specified by the queries. In addition, advertisers and/or publishers may direct on-line content tailored to certain audiences based on characteristics of that audience, such as geographical location, in order to provide more relevant and useful information to the audience.
For example, user queries that include geographic content may enable enterprises to identify entities, such as place names, street addresses, or other entities associated with a specific physical location. Geographic or other query types may provide an important source of revenue for e-commerce enterprises, such as Internet-based search engines, advertisers, etc. E-commerce enterprises provide results to a user based on the user's submitted query terms or other relevant information. In this manner, such enterprises may provide advertising and other information or content to the user.
However, indexing geographical location data for retrieval in such applications is becoming increasingly challenging as data volumes are increasing in size, and as service providers and on-line publishers attempt to organize geographical data for faster retrieval. Different publishers and advertisers often operate in different business environments and have varying criteria for determining what products to target to which audience(s). Thus, many applications dealing with geographical data, such as for publishing results to Internet queries or geographical audience targeting by advertisers, should allow a publisher and/or advertiser to geographically tailor their advertising or search result content to an optimal target audience. A need therefore exists for a system that offers flexibility to advertisers, publishers, and other on-line content delivery entities, in defining geographical target zones that are optimal to their unique business environments.